In my class, creativity occurs in our figurative language
analysis. When we discuss poems, our students are asked to interpret and think
critically about the poem. When they do this, students bring their individual
background knowledge and experiences to their interpretations. This fosters creativity
because the students are asked to think above or outside of concrete facts.
There is never just one answer; in our class, students are told that as long as
they can argue effectively their stance, they are correct. We recently gave a summative assessment about
transcendentalism and romanticism in which we gave students the choice between
turning in a written, visual, or mathematical project. We gave them the rubric
we will be using and the requirements for each project. We have 2 or 3 people
working on a mathematical approach to comparing and contrasting the two
literary movements in relation to the literature we read in class.
In my class, critical thinking is something we do every day.
Our students have to think critically about literature, an author’s philosophical
belief or approach, and the impact a piece of literature has on society. We ask
that students base their assumptions and inferences and ideas in the
information we’ve discussed in class and in the texts themselves. Problem
solving occurs less frequently in my English classes. However, a lot of my
students love to predict the outcomes and character actions, so we do ask
students to predict when we can. By
predicting base off the knowledge they’ve gleaned from the text and from the
context of the story, students are utilizing their problem solving skills.
Our students communicate and discuss with one another every
day. We constantly turn into table groups of 4 and share our thoughts. We have
whole-class discussions and as a teacher, I simply facilitate the
conversations. My students love discussing with one another.
In my class, I teach my students to think critically about
the information they encounter in life (information literacy). We do a
joint-research project with History, in which students have to find 10 sources
and use 5 of them. They have to include a brief paragraph about why the sources they didn’t use were not
viable for the paper. Through thinking critically about the topic, the context,
and the knowledge they’ve learned in class, my students practice information
literacy frequently.
The first unit we teach is on argument. Argument, we
informed the students, is everywhere: it’s in advertisements, comics, literature,
TV shows, news journalism. Argument is the idea of having a stance and using
logos, pathos, ethos, and rhetorical devices to best persuade others. In doing
so, we inform students that they need to be able to think critically about the
information given to them and how the mode of the information (media, text,
etc.) drives the purpose of the people behind the information. We teach our
students to think critically about the media presented to them both inside and
outside the classroom.
Technology is used every day in my classroom. We do a lot of
work with the document camera and listen to audio books and visual clips when we
can. We do trips to the computer lab and career center to do workshops on our
research paper and the project we have due soon about Transcendentalism and
American romanticism. Our students love getting out of the classroom and
working on computers. We will be setting up a blog soon for the students to use
in an online forum sort of setting, so they can communicate with all the 11 grade
College Prep classes that my CT and I teach together.
Our students have a hard time with homework. We give them reasons
and purpose behind each assignment we have them do and explain that it’s not
busy work. In class, we work independently and then after a few minutes we tell
the students that it’s OK to talk with a neighbor if they would like to. We
have been working with having the students read directions more (they seem to
refuse to read directions) and so we’re going to be doing a lesson where we give
them a list of 3 things they need to do and then we said “you have 15 minutes
to do them all. Go.” We recently did that with a gallery walk, where we had
stations around the room color coded. We told the students that they had to go
to one of each color and answer the questions provided. We told them they had
15 minutes to do them all and that we’d reconvene then. It worked really well,
and we adjusted the time as needed for each class. During our reflection time
at the end, the students told me that they really liked being able to move
around the room at their leisure and that they liked having choice in the
stations. I really want to do more activities like that in the future.
My students are always interacting with one another. We’ve
got assigned seats of homogeneous table groups of 4. Each unit, we make a new
seating chart. Students often turn into their table groups and discuss what
they need to. We also do parallel teaching when we can. For example, we’re
reading a play, Inherit the Wind, and
there are at most 20 speaking characters in an act. We split our class into two
groups of 20 and alternate taking out groups outside and we read the act out
loud. My group really enjoyed going outside and reading out loud. Students in
my class rarely just sit at their desks, passively acquiring information. We
even offer clipboards to students that want to get out of their seat and stand
in class.
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